WWE News: SmackDown Live viewership hits worst number since October
What's the story?
Fans who watched the show had nothing but good things to say about this week's episode of SmackDown Live, but the viewership has continued on its downward trend.
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The May 22 edition of SmackDown got 2.195 million views, which was down by 103,000 viewers from last week's average of 2.298 million.
In case you didn't know...
The show's biggest matches were The Miz vs Big E, Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows vs The Usos and Daniel Bryan vs Jeff Hardy.
The key segment from this show was The MizTV segment with the New Day and Shinsuke Nakamura revealing the stipulation for his WWE Championship match against AJ Styles at Money in the Bank.
The heart of the matter
The NBA Conference Finals game between the Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors meanwhile, dominated the Tuesday night ratings and managed to generate 8.296 million viewers for TNT.
SmackDown was a good episode according to fans, but the show has been declining in weekly viewership for six weeks now - only the May 15 episode saw a slight increase in terms of viewers.
Not only was this week's episode the lowest viewed throughout 2018 to date, it was also the lowest viewed episode since the October 31, 2017 SmackDown episode - during Jinder Mahal's topical WWE Championship reign.
What's next?
WWE announced two matches ahead of next week's SmackDown Live, as The Miz and he Bar are set to take on The New Day whilst Daniel Bryan is scheduled for one-on-one action against Samoa Joe.
Next week should also see spots for both the men and women's Money in the Bank Ladder matches finalised too.
Author's take
It's amazing how good shows doesn't translate towards better viewership. Even against the NBA Finals, at a productive time for the sport of basketball, these numbers are disappointing.
SmackDown's viewership has not dipped to two million since June last year but given the downward trajectory that they have suffered recently, there's no reason why they will not fall back into that territory with less-than-encouraging numbers at present.